THE EDITOR AT THE BALL GAME
(WORLD’S SERIES OPENING, 1922)
At the Polo Grounds yesterday $119,000 worth of baseball was played. Of that, however, only a meagre $60,000 or so went to the players. We wonder how much the accumulated sports writers got for writing about it. They are the real plutocrats of professional athletics.
We have long intimated our inflexible determination to learn how to be a sports writer—or, as he is usually called, a Scribe. This is to announce progress. We are getting promoted steadily. In the 1920 World’s Series we were high up in the stand. At the Dempsey-Carpentier liquidation we were not more than a parasang from the ring. We broke into the press box at the 1921 World’s Series, but only in the rearward allotments assigned to correspondents from Harrisburg and Des Moines.
But our stuff is beginning to be appreciated. We are gaining. Yesterday we found ourself actually below the sacred barrier—in the Second Row, right behind the Big Fellows. Down there we were positively almost on social terms (if we had ventured to speak to them) with chaps like Bill McGeehan and Grant Rice and Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. Well, there are a lot of climbers in the world of sporting literature.
One incident amused us. We heard a man say, “Which one is Damon Runyon?” “Over there,” said another, pointing. The first, probably hoping to wangle some sort of prestige, made for Mr. Runyon. “Hullo, Damon!” he cried genially. “Remember me?”
It must have been Pythias.
So far we have only been allowed to shoot in a little preliminary patter—what managing editors call “human interest stuff.” When the actual game starts they take the wire away from us, quite rightly, and turn it over to the experts. But, being inexorably ambitious, we sit down now, after the game is over, to tell you exactly how we saw it. Because we had a unique opportunity to study a great journalist and see exactly how it’s done. It was just our good luck, sitting in the second row. The second sees better than the first—it’s higher. You have to use your knee for writing desk, and you have to pull up your haunches every few minutes to let by the baseball editor of the Topeka Clarion on his way back to Harry Stevens’s Gratis Tiffin for another platter of salad. But the second row gave us our much needed opportunity to watch the leaders of our craft.
It was just before the game began. The plump lady in white tights (a little too opulent to be Miss Kellermann, but evidently a diva of some sort) was about to begin the walking race around the bases against the athletic-looking man. She won, by the way—what a commutrix she would make. Suddenly we recognized a very Famous Editor climbing into the seat directly in front of us. He was followed by two earnest young men. One of these respectfully placed a Noiseless typewriter in front of the Editor, and spread out a thick pile of copy paper.
This young man had shell spectacles and truncated side-whiskers. Both young men were plainly experts, and were there to tell the Editor the fine points of what was happening. The Famous Editor’s job was to whale it out on the Noiseless, with that personal touch that has made him (it has been said) the most successful American newspaper man.